> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?
so for a while, due to strange quirk of circumstance, i had the inside track of a profitable adult website. it was your standard “streaming adult videos, no ads, charge hefty subscription” model. one morning the ceo says let’s do community. everyone’s going social. lets have blogs, message board, the whole shebang. Announcement made with much fanfare. The idiot audience thought community means they could talk to their favorite pornstar :) once the ceo clarifies that no, community doesn’t mean that, they turn on him like a pack of wolves. what do you mean, you want us to talk to each other ?! like random perv from oklahoma should message arbitrary perv from cleveland about which vid gets him off ? wtf ?!! the poor ceo’s got his back to a wall. he says, we’ll be the world’s largest adult community. the peeps are like, dude, largest community of pervs ? fbi will have a ball. half of us are scared our employer or our spouse or worse, teenage son hacks into our account. now you want us to have wacky avatars & actually talk to each other on a messageboard so whatever we say persists for posterity ? it quickly went downhill from there. they brought in a moderator, sort of like dang. he was supposed to police the crowds & tamp down on contentious disagreement. but hardly anybody participated, so they had to broaden dang’s role. so now everytime a video was posted, poor dang would have to watch the whole video and make insightful comments like “lady featured in this clip at 7:15 is the same lady in that other clip at 9:20” and so on. soon he became an encyclopedia of porn trivia. people actually started showing up on the community board just to poke fun of his wide acumen.
Around that time i quit. But it was quite the experience. Community can be a major hassle.
So you're telling me there's a dude named Dang out there with an incredible wealth of porn knowledge? That's really cool in the weirdest way and I bet you he can't even tell anyone about it for the rest of his life
so for a while, due to strange quirk of circumstance, i had the inside track of a profitable adult website. it was your standard “streaming adult videos, no ads, charge hefty subscription” model. one morning the ceo says let’s do community. everyone’s going social. lets have blogs, message board, the whole shebang. Announcement made with much fanfare. The idiot audience thought community means they could talk to their favorite pornstar :) once the ceo clarifies that no, community doesn’t mean that, they turn on him like a pack of wolves. what do you mean, you want us to talk to each other ?! like random perv from oklahoma should message arbitrary perv from cleveland about which vid gets him off ? wtf ?!! the poor ceo’s got his back to a wall. he says, we’ll be the world’s largest adult community. the peeps are like, dude, largest community of pervs ? fbi will have a ball. half of us are scared our employer or our spouse or worse, teenage son hacks into our account. now you want us to have wacky avatars & actually talk to each other on a messageboard so whatever we say persists for posterity ? it quickly went downhill from there. they brought in a moderator, sort of like dang. he was supposed to police the crowds & tamp down on contentious disagreement. but hardly anybody participated, so they had to broaden dang’s role. so now everytime a video was posted, poor dang would have to watch the whole video and make insightful comments like “lady featured in this clip at 7:15 is the same lady in that other clip at 9:20” and so on. soon he became an encyclopedia of porn trivia. people actually started showing up on the community board just to poke fun of his wide acumen. Around that time i quit. But it was quite the experience. Community can be a major hassle.